MSU TV Commercial Detector

Project Assistance

You can help us by providing broadcasting samples (sports, movies, talk-shows, etc.) with uncut commercial.

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Introduction

Commercial breaks take up to 20% time of broadcasting. When you record television programmes for home collection,
it is reasonable to cut out commercial blocks in order to reduce size of the videofile and keep your time, that
is usually spent on fast forwarding of advertisements. Commercial breaks can be detected by estimating special
features of segments and by tracking of tv-channel logo.

MSU TV Commercial Detector

MSU TV Commercial Detector is a tool for TV Commercial Detection.
Program uses videofiles with broadcasting as input. After processing it writes AviSynth script with marking showing
what videoframes to exclude.

Work of algorithm

Instruction

You need to install AviSynth for normal work of program. You can download it from official site avisynth.org.

Program is launched from command line. You need to enter only one parameter: name of the processing file.Example:

msu-commdetector.exe example.mpg

Program will create avs file to open video and then will proceed to work.
When program is launched without paremeters it tries to open file "source.avs" in home folder.
The result of program work will be a textfile "result.txt" with marking of commercial block by frames and avs script removing these commercial blocks from video.
Made avs file can be opened with any program working with avi (for example: VirtualDub, MeGUI, AviDemux, etc.).

Program screenshot

Examples of work

Advanced settings

In file commdetector.ini you can specify advanced settings.

AnalyzeLogo = 0

Don't perform logo extraction. Useful for TV channels where logo doesn't fade for commercial time or in cases when program gives result that don't seem to be truth.

ExtractCommercial = 1

To create avs script including only commercial. May be useful for checking whether program is working correctly or not.

WriteDebugScript = 1

To create avs script where every block is subscribed as commercial or non-commercial.

Sometimes program yields wrong results by reason of incorrect work of installed in system MPEG-2 decoder.
You may use external decoder to solve the problem. Download archive (1.45 MB)
and unpack its content to folder c:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\
Also it's necessary to specify in settings file using of external decoder:

Public MSU video filters
Here are available VirtualDub and AviSynth filters.
For a given type of digital video filtration we typically develop a
family of different algorithms and implementations.
Generally there are also versions optimized for PC and hardware
implementations (ASIC/FPGA/DSP). These optimized versions can be
licensed to companies. Please contact us for details via
video(at)graphics.cs.msu_ru.

Filters for companies
We are working with Intel, Samsung, RealNetworks and other companies on
adapting our filters other video processing algorithms for specific
video streams, applications and hardware like TV-sets, graphics cards,
etc. Some of such projects are non-exclusive. Also we have internal
researches. Please let us know via video(at)graphics.cs.msu_ru if you are interested
in acquiring a license for such filters or making a custom R&D project
on video processing, compression, computer vision.